by Brian Castro
In my tub I dreamt only of drifting, watching the passersby, now appearing evil in their maniacal purpose. Heading somewhere seemed to me an inherent illness; linear, venal, well plotted. My own form glowed palely beneath the water; limp and unrefined. I remembered Bacon giving me one of his pentimentos in London, the panels washed out with rusty paint he’d poured over them in rage and self-mortification. You can have the whole box and dice, he said to me. The triptych was too large to fit through the door. I wished it folded like an Oriental screen. I had to cut it up. I suspected his portraits were of me, naked. He paid me nevertheless for his failure. I spent several weeks unsuccessfully rubbing them back. My friend, my friends, I cut through everything. It would have been better to have been satisfied with the maestro’s russet bath. When I finished, there was a peroration of brown and jade. I painted over them with super-human recollection and sold them to the Red Brigades.
The trees are bending. I lie unconscious in the tepid water while it swindles me with winter currents. Bath fugues: I return to Berlin, Paris, Vladivostok in a vertigo. A claw-foot tub is always good for spirals; to be carried away in the present tense by a griffin on curlicues of dreams; flights of fancy. I will now submerge. To practise a bath fugue is to ride a bicycle underwater. Walking while sitting, motion in place. Beneath the suds all is calm, quite circular, grey, with minor variations. Hello! It was Marie. I will have to hide. The dragon breathes at my keyhole which I’ve recently stoppered with chewing gum. The knob is swivelling back and forth. I wonder how long I can stay under. The past rushes forward. Drifting. Even Montaigne liked to drift, but only on holidays. I decided everybody was a contradiction, selling ideas at two prices. Fatal to follow any one. Hello, Jason; I know you’re in there!
3
Michel de Montaigne. There was a deep emptiness at the centre of everything he wrote. His friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, or ‘Booty’, corrupted his marriage and ruined his kidneys. He no longer had sexual relations with his wife, preferring to quote Socrates: He who takes a wife shall repent of it. How true, how true, how true. I’ve had three, and the ternary, a psychoanalyst, nailed me to the mast. Gisela said I was lacking a notion of the real, like the phallus, which only existed in a dialectic of the eye, in terms of what it had missed. I had no idea what she was talking about as I was blinded by love, but every time I read the phrase trompe-l’oeil in art catalogues, I thought of the way she spoke to my penis, wagging it like a finger puppet, practising ventriloquy. I was measuring up one-eyed, Cyclopean, missing my strumpets and oils. That marriage was supposed to be third time lucky. We spent three years together. Gisela liked things in threes. The first orgasm got rid of the pain; the second, she said, was plain pleasure; the third however, was bliss. She had never reached the third. Never lost control. Hard work for me. The simple truth was that there was Man’s love and then there was Woman’s. The former ran on one rail; the latter derailed everywhere. One day I got on my bicycle and forgot to return for six weeks. I cycled into the worst storms in history. Met Napoleon at Waterloo. Hannibal in the Alps. Was alone on the Russian steppes. In Hanoi I sat beneath rattan ceiling fans batting at tumid cigar smoke exhaled by droopy desperadoes − man’s estate. When I returned, Gisela told her friends I was affected by a mild psychosis. It wasn’t mild. The police were on my trail.
4
Montaigne was on his travels, approaching Rome. It was the summer of 1581. He was heading for San Sebastián, where natural springs produced miraculous cures. He was a connoisseur of water. He drank a quart an hour to rid himself of kidney stones. All that gaseous liquid gave him wind. He would spend nine days at San Sebastián. It was in an old Roman bath, where men and women sat together, naked in the fresh and lively stream for the sole purpose of conversation, when he felt the sudden stab of love. She was Spanish and shapely, her face dark and pretty, and she rubbed him down with quicklime for depilation, her Iberian novenas gurgling over his neck and back, readying his body for the burial pit. For Montaigne, it was a good reminder of the need for eros. In his essays thus far, he had only managed stale solitude, empty eternity, ineffable infinity. Time was running out. He needed a friend.
Montaigne had no friend. Booty had died on him prematurely. Brevity was, Montaigne surmised, perfection. Grief washed over him in little particles. The Spanish woman noticed his melancholy and waded around to edge upon his knee. Together, some tickling. Nothing like paid pleasure to guarantee happiness. I see them wedged together in a darkened corner. Their niche. He wore a short beard. She had a mole in the small of her back. Upon an unsuccessful orgasm, an internal return, Montaigne experienced the sharpest pain. It was pleasure, he wrote, inflamed with difficulty: stinging tingling and smarting with arrowes. Marriage had blunted all of that. For a moment he thought he had triumphed over Socrates, for whose decrepit wisdom no maiden was ever going to trade her thighs. That night, Montaigne thought again of Booty’s early death. Down the road at the church of San Giovanni Porta Latina, he heard fireworks, as priests performed gay marriages. He went to the toilet. There was no other person there on the long bench. He squatted over an asphyxiating miasma…the wooden wall against which he leant was impregnated with the odour of decaying cabbages. He tried to pass water. No success. Anyone who entered would have seen him grimacing with pain, a non-committal smile upon his face. It had plagued him all his life, this non-committal smile − his portraits confirmed it − hiding his anger and contempt for those who only pretended suffering. Poor Booty. At least his friend had written sonnets in all his youthfulness and had had no thought of failure. Booty, after all, had suffered the real thing: death before fame. A fate worthy of a true friend. Montaigne began something of a movement amongst philosophers in losing one’s friends. In 1654, exactly eightythree years after Montaigne retired to his tower to begin writing his essays, the philosopher Blaise Pascal suffered an intense spiritual crise. He became an ascetic and grew wary of affection, abandoning all his friends. Friends were crutches.
I was interested in Montaigne’s determination to disavow intimacy, avoid melancholy and turn his life towards an inquiry into learning how to die. It was self-discovery at its best. At thirtyeight, he ensconced himself in a round tower with his books. At the completion of his Essays, towards the end of his life, he would come to the conclusion that nothing was perfect, least of all, friendship. His best friend, Étienne de La Boétie, had been dead for many years. His own essay on friendship was meant to be both an introduction and a monument to Booty’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Discovering that this had already been published, or that it was too republican and volatile, he decided on reproducing the sonnets. When he found that these too had been published, he excised them completely, making only a mention of them in the empty parentheses of his own introduction. Disappointed his own writing was ant-like and prudent rather than reckless and brilliant – a writing that nevertheless persistently undermined itself, since it desired to be art – Montaigne entombed the sonnets in silence. Was he honoring his friend or was he protecting himself? Perhaps he was embarrassed at revealing the fragile noise of Booty’s youthfulness. Then again, perhaps he wanted his own essays to shine without the colouring of others. We will never know. It was posterity creeping up, something quite a few of us come to hear at the end of our lives: time’s collapse before naked ambition. Montaigne noticed that his testicles drooped. He looked in the mirror and plucked the dead blossoms from Booty’s grave. His essay would be the final word on friendship and there would be no poetry.
Impressed by Montaigne’s austerity, this farewell to poetry, I tried to make my mind as sceptical, my body as ascetic, my curiosity as intrepid. I rode my bicycle endlessly, a pathetic martyrdom to failure, since staying upright was dependent upon perpetual motion and resting was an eternal falling. It was hell. But once at speed, on a reasonably flat surface, it became effortless, gravity-defying, other-dimensional…plunging into new territory, where no friend existed, dead or alive, to hold you back. Being, wrote Montaign
e, consists in motion. Pascal would reproduce that phrase: Our nature consists in motion. Copycat Blaise. Such surface meditation always brought me meaning. Motion erases emotion, I wrote vertiginously.
So much for philosophy.
5
Dr Judith was staring into my eyes. Hers were violet, without shrinking. Like love, the deep resulted in occlusion. I had already lived too long to dive into those cupidinous weeds. Whenever Judith examined me, I followed rivers of thought. For one who does not exist fully as himself, a woman doctor gave direction. With a mind that knew my body thoroughly, Dr Judith was both Mother and the Marquis de Sade, whom I paid for extra consultations outside of surgery time. Judith Sarraute, a cycling physician, could speak of the Tour de France and Oulipo in one breath, the Nouveau Roman and Paris-Roubaix in another. She challenged me to a hundred-kilometre randonnée during which we had to randomly select our favourite books whose titles did not contain the letters a, e, i or o. We would then have to defend our choices. I was found wanting. Tunc!, she yelled as she rode off, leaving me far behind. You have to read me backwards! When I caught up I told her about Guy de Maupassant; about his gregariousness…he was riparian as well…how he rowed up the Seine every morning, fifty kilometres without fail, against the current…until he got the pox. Then his face shrivelled up and his mouth drooped, leaving only enormous eyes fading with the light of fatality. One day he fainted on the towpath while riding his bicycle. He was wearing an all-in-one suit pioneered by Jules Léotard, the trapeze artist. When he recovered by the side of the canal, he started to howl like a dog. Passers-by didn’t help. They didn’t like the look of him. Imagine wearing something so immodest out on the promenade! He must have had evil intentions. Mauvais passant. Up to no good. Pédé! Gustave Flaubert said he couldn’t understand how anyone could have spent so much time having so many love affairs. You don’t need that much experience to learn the monotony of passion, he wrote to a woman friend.
In the winter of 1853, Flaubert, novelist and bourgeois, was reading Montaigne in bed. Like his eiderdown, he found Montaigne’s absolute doubt about everything extremely warm and soothing. In the winter of 1573, Montaigne, essayist and ascetic, took a turn in the library of his cold stone tower, picked out a book on Diogenes of Sinope and read it in a Bordeaux tavern by a roaring fire. In the summer of 323 BC, Diogenes, cosmopolitan and cynic, took up residence in a wooden tub outside the temple of Cybele to demonstrate his freedom from material desire. He drank water from his cupped hands and ate only onions. He emerged from his bath before noon and walked through the marketplace at midday with a lit lantern, looking for an honest man in the canicular heat. All three understood the irony of authenticity.
Dog’s breath. Dog years. Old dogs.
6
Where was I? In what era? I was fleeing, as I had always done. The flapping sign on the Putty Road had taken hold in my mind’s eye: Martins Boarding Kennels. Unnecessary apostrophes appeared daily on roadside notices, but here I found their absence annoying. I remembered turning into that dusty road on my rusty Swift and I remembered seeing the swinging board. Made from pine or rosewood. I remember my father’s funeral. I remember Charlie Walsh, an old school friend who was an undertaker. Pine or rosewood? was Charlie’s only question. I got it on a discount. Now I was lying in the creek thinking of Gottlieb’s little daughter. I was confused. I wondered if she were mine. Although a twin, Blimunde was dark and Blixen fair. Northerners were fair, southerners dark. All could be transmogrified, Doctor Judith said.
Upon my liberation from Rome I had found myself on the banks of the Rhône (or was it the Saône), when a slanting rain washed away the circumflexes in my diary. Without a roof, with no means, a sans abri, I was advised to call upon the nearest jail for soup and beans. But I was proud and clung to poetry, not to the coat-tails of the gendarmerie. My family had sprung from the Pearl River estuary in China; they were riparian to say the least − hark, one diverse branch of my name: De Rivière, whence one derived the name Redvers. I found the confluence of rivers congenial. Currents of East and West, Europe and Asia. People mistook me: in certain lights I could be an Eskimo, Latin American, Nepalese. The light in the south of France was harsh, but at dusk it was mixed with lavender. Here, in the purple light on a large river, they saw me as Vietnamese, casting my net in my conical hat. The banks had been newly concreted and reinforced with a mosaic of pipes and tunnels. These were stormwater drains or flood relief viaducts. Egress and ingress. There I had my dwelling for several weeks hoping the river wouldn’t rise beyond its runnels. Rats were more than company. Their chattering monitored water levels. Before long I had constructed a raft from debris and poled downstream each day to forage through restaurant bins. I ate well without illness, thanks to punctuality and discrimination, avoiding truffle tins and cognac glasses in which the well-to-do stubbed out their cigars. I collected what kitchenhands trimmed in preparation when they were distracted, or on the phone. Those healthy shards freshly shaved in the early morning made me stout, sustained me well: discards, disjecta, scraps, excisions. Such marginalia invited memory to dine out. Years after my father’s death, I started missing him, his scratchy hi-fi, the smell of balichão, his eau de cologne.
I was poling my craft upriver, struggling with the afternoon current and a headwind, when I looked up and suffered a romantic crise. A woman was hailing me from a bridge. She was astride her mobilette, a baguette in her knapsack, her arm upraised. The pylons loomed up suddenly…some frieze of popes carved in stone…I was moving backwards battling to stay upright, feeling my way from dark to light…the remedy was to head diagonally for the nearest shore. I could no longer see the rest of her, but she had flashing teeth and looked like an American Kennedy. As I passed under, she followed my regress, appearing on the other railing to toss the bread to me. I caught the manna miraculously, performed a salutation, but she was gone. A perfume lingered on the loaf. It was almost dark as I worked my way through the loam along the bank, oblivious to the fact that I was still some miles from home.
I did not see the woman again until an exhibition in a small gallery in Toulouse. By this time I had developed something of a reputation as a ‘river artist’, a painter of tramps under bridges, weeds and booze. Her name was Marie de Nerval, and she was a friend of the curator of the Bonnefoi Galleries. Marie had put on weight. She no longer rode her mobilette. She was the daughter of a marquis and she invited me out to her château for Sunday lunch en famille. We were interlaced in conversation during the meal and then we pored over a few sketches before her father, a deaf old man in plus-fours, applied his seal to them and ushered us into different rooms. He then proceeded to ask me about the calendar of events for the summer season of opera. He was under the impression I was a musician, but when I assured him I was tone deaf, he smiled and hugged me as though he had found a long lost friend. When are you getting married? he asked. I answered in halting French: Honi soit qui mal y pense. What ho, ill seen, ill said, I continued, and then he complained of ancient laws and gleaners on his estates. He was powerless, he said, to rescind a sixteenth-century decree permitting them to gather grapes that had escaped the harvester. Well, worstward ho! For to end yet again amongst the grapes of wrath, I sympathised, that’s how it is, with mice and men. We patted each other’s backs upon parting.
The year turned yellow. It felt like 1554…I don’t know why that date came to mind. I was probably rapt with the penal code which permitted vagabonds a second harvest. The Marquis was smarting from a costly legal suit to have it overturned. Marie de Nerval and I were married in the spring. Provence was where she yearned to live and we moved into her thirteenth-century house in Rousillon d’Apt. I could not rid myself of habit and in the early mornings set out on my bicycle for orchards with my waxy carton to gather fallen fruit. Marie started a private press, the Editions Nerval, and published obscure writers in limited, signed editions, printed on Magnani Velata Avorio paper in Bembo twenty-four point. These were all lost in the great Avignon warehous
e fire of 1978. The insurance payout was hefty and rumours spread, accusing the Marquis of arson, but the police could prove nothing. They suspected me instead. I had a record.
Marie and I spent many afternoons gazing over the Roman ramparts at the red soil and lavender hills of the Vaucluse. The colours still stay with me. Beneath the town were two stone wash-sheds; one for the healthy and one for the sick. They were built in a time of plague. In June 1585 it reached Bordeaux. The mayor, Michel de Montaigne, fled. For six months he wandered nomadically around the countryside. He suffered guilt over this dereliction of duty. He threaded his way through the civil war that followed, passing as both Protestant and Catholic. He shortened his name to Michel Eyquem. He was no hero. The only thing that kept him going was his reading. I too, read by the wash-sheds. Cholera came rattling through here after Napoleon; vibrio comma, a bacterium, sabre-curved, faster than a horse. When the rains came, I noticed a touch of madness in Marie’s dark eyes, in the long dank hair with which she used to shield her face; in the unattractive smocks she began wearing, stained under the arms, moping around the courtyard wielding a scythe, trying to weed the unruly garden, applying only a few half-hearted strokes. The Roman waterspouts were broken and muddy water spewed over her. O Marie, I pleaded, don’t try to be a peasant! Step out from that dungheap. O Marie, how distant were you when you lapsed into anomie, unconscious of my presence! How infected were you by that congenital disease, the de Nerval syndrome, whose classification and symptoms are still hidden in the National Archives at the Palais Soubise under five hundred years of legal silence! (Modern terminology would have you slumming it, or addicted to bohemianism; dressing down.) Nights you floated past the end of my bed with a bottle in your hand, the dark stone wall behind you weeping with centuries of damp. I did not understand how hard you were striving for the fever to break. All I heard was the generator switching over in the storm, your yearning for the noisy labour of child-bearing, your fears of the madness being passed on. I did not comprehend the obsession you had with your family portrait – your sisters, wearing large crucifixes around their necks, seemed destined for bordellos. I was not as self-involved. I sought other intimacies. There were degrees of lunacy that could coexist. Your smiling sibling Lisette screamed obscenities as I read Sade to her with my hand beneath her skirt. (This tableau is familiar. I must check who painted that first.) Of course I have always led a clandestine life. In a way, this secretiveness was my truth. Marie tried to pry it out of me at every opportunity and all I needed to do was to appease her, to say the appropriate thing about my clumsiness, my misdemeanour with her younger sister, but I did no such thing. More than a matter of pride, I saw it as a kind of creative intervention, justified by the fact that it was consistently rekindled as a method of saving Marie. With such healing power, a secret had to remain just that. One late morning, perhaps it was at the break of noon, I cannot remember, I heard a tremendous crash. She had thrown my typewriter out the window. My Olivetti Lexikon, one of the first electric golf-ball portables, solid, heavy as a set of weights. I saw the memoir I was writing roll end over end, down into the river.
